[michaeljelly]

Honestly so glad it's a paid service. I'm happy to pay for something I can trust to handle my messages, rather than using them against me to sell ads/send to shady data brokers!

Awesome work Eric, Tulir, and the whole Matrix team too!

[pimeys]

I've been in the past few nights trying to build my own Matrix server with integrations to Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, IRC, Slack et.al. It is quite a lot of work, even with the Ansible script. First was the DNS SRV record, that is needed to federate with matrix.org. And the Signal integration happily sent messages to my friends, but I never got any messages back.

I have quite a lot of experience with Linux and server maintenance. And I know if I put enough time to this, I'll get everything to work eventually. I'm still saying that paying money for somebody else to do this feels like a nice investment at this point. The task of doing everything by yourself is quite tricky.

[pimeys]

Need to add now I got everything working. Element running in my own domain, connecting Signal, Telegram, Matrix federation and IRC in a beautiful way.

It is a lot of work, some of the documentation can be a bit tough if you don't know how things work together and especially the DNS setup can take a bit of time to get the federation working.

[aloisdg]

If you achieve it, it could be nice to improve the existing documentation.

[rattray]

Sorry, just to clarify - are you saying that self-hosting Beeper is a lot of work, or that self-hosting Matrix with bridges without Beeper is a lot of work?

[spiffytech]

$10/mo is steeper than I like for a chat app, but this is so huge to just roll everything into one place, and I like that it's OSS, so I'm happy to pitch in and support the devs even if I'm capable of self-hosting the backend.

[petre]

For $10/mo one could host their own VPS and server infra.

[robinhood]

Classic HN comment. Yeah, $10/mo, + the time needed to setup everything + the time to maintain it + the security holes to patch yourself + the downtime because the instance rebooted for some reasons + the monitoring of the service + all the time wasted because you could have simply lived your life and paid the reasonable fees for the service in the first place.

[petre]

Not at all, prosody and ejabberd both work flawlessly without all of that nonsense. If it's a shitty piece of software maybe, but then why even bother using it in the first place?

[imwillofficial]

“All that nonsense” Are the realities of running any software.

[krageon]

If you don't care about the uptime of your chat service you may as well not have one. Eventually those things will be the same.

[rattray]

The first sentence in your otherwise useful post doesn't feel helpful to the conversation.

[tutfbhuf]

I already have a VPS for other reasons, so I'm glad if I could get a self-hosted solution.

[m-p-3]

But that includes setting up and maintaining it, as well as troubleshooting when there's an issue.

For some, $10/month is a nice way to have all that worry-free.

[411111111111111]

The messages still go through the "free" networks, so they're still being used exactly like that.